the summer of the great secret monica edwards

Tamzin’s attic bedroom can be seen at the top of the house. Since 1979, it’s been run as a B&B and you can see it here. The vicarage building is real and still standing, although obviously altered now. I like the way Monica Edwards always gives the detail I like in a novel Mrs Grey putting bread and butter on ‘a blue and white plate’, for instance. My favourite parts are the depictions of family life at the Vicarage Tam’s baby brother Diccon and his strange taste for salt, her father busy with his chickens and bees in the garden or writing a sermon, her mother busy with the house, Diccon and parish work. What sets the book apart is the quality of the writing and the very believable characters. By the end of the book, Tamzin has her own pony (no spoilers as to how), so on the face of it, this is a conventional story: girl wants pony, can’t afford one but gets her heart’s desire anyway. This is the last time a gymkhana is ever mentioned Tamzin and Rissa love riding for the sake of it, not for winning rosettes and it’s such a pity that for years Monica Edwards was categorised as a writer of pony books, when she really wasn’t. They get plenty of riding and even acquit themselves well in a gymkhana. After they bravely stop a valuable runaway horse, they are heroines and given the freedom of the stables. She’s cleverer than Tamzin and good at maths.īoth girls are mad about horses and think of little else, so there’s great excitement when they learn that the Hillocks Riding School is to spend the summer locally and exercise the horses on Dunsford sands.

Tamzin has an attic bedroom where she’s allowed to stick pictures of horses all over the walls Rissa has to put up with a pretty pink and grey room which is her mother’s taste, not hers. Her family is better off than Tamzin’s (her father owns a timber yard) and her mother is fussy. She’s a dreamy girl, good at English but not much else. Her parents are just about perfect (or so I thought as a child). In the first book, she is ten, knows everyone in the village (and they know all about her), and has a lot of freedom to swim in the sea, row Jim Decks’ ferry boat and run around with Rissa.

Tamzin is the daughter of the Vicar of Westling, has her hair in plaits and usually wears shorts. Monica Edwards was writing about the Romney Marsh of her childhood, just as in the Punchbowl series she was describing the real farm she and her husband ran in Surrey. They are the most ‘pony’ books of the set and in the next book, The Midnight Horse, the girls meet Meryon and Roger, so that two friends become four and the books are very different. These are about Tamzin Grey and her best friend, Clarissa (Rissa) Birnie.

I decided to deal separately with the first two books in the series: Wish for a Pony (1947) and The Summer of the Great Secret (1948).

The summer of the great secret monica edwards